Craftsman Creative

[00:00:00] Hello everybody. This is Daren with Craftsman Creative, and today in this episode we are talking about the next part of the movie framework, which is O outcomes. O stands for outcomes. Now, why are we talking about outcomes? We started with mindset. Now we're talking about outcomes. When are we gonna get to the good stuff?

Well, you know, my belief is that the mindset. Is 80% of your success. So we start there and now we talk about outcomes because your outcomes are what determine your strategy and your approach and your tactics, and how you're going to show up and do the work every day. If you don't define the outcome first, it's kind of like aiming for a target with a blindfold on.

You'll never hit it, and you might try many, many, many times. You might even get lucky once or twice, but it's not a repeatable strategy. Let's dive into this. What. Do we need to focus on in order to [00:01:00] understand this part of the framework, which is outcomes? Now, while I do very little competitive analysis in my industry, I flat out just don't care and I don't find it a good use of time to go and look at what my competitors are doing.

And honestly, I don't even see them as competitors. I see them as potential collaborators or partners. And so I really don't do tons of competitive analysis, but I guess I do pay attention when I see other people who do similar things to what I do. When they show up on social or I sign up for their emails or those kind of things, but from what I've seen, No one else is talking about the mindset and the outcome pieces when it comes to doing this type of creative work.

They generally start with strategy, so they talk about Twitter growth and buy my Twitter course or or LinkedIn carousels or the new things. So everybody hears how to hack those and how to do them well. How to hack the algorithm or scale with partnerships or write more effective emails. Now those are all well and.[00:02:00]

but later down the line, they're not what you should start with. You don't start with strategy. You start with mindset, and then you focus on the outcome. So Cal Newport coined the phrase, the craftsman mindset in his book. So Good they Can't Ignore You. I read it in 2015 and have probably read it a number of times since two or three other times since.

But back in 2015 when I read it the first time, it completely flipped my thinking. Now, at the time I was trying to make movies as a producer and a co-owner of a video production company. We had had zero success to that point, but after reading the. , I changed my approach. So what happened in that book?

Well, Cal Newport talks about the craftsman mindset, which is an outcome focused approach to creative work. He contrasts it with the very popular passion led approach where you decide what you want to do and what you love, and then you figure it out and it just doesn't work. And [00:03:00] that's what we were doing.

We had this passion and desire to produce movie. So the shift for me was instead of focusing on working harder or being more passionate or having more desire, I decided to define the. I wanted to produce a movie, but even more than that, I wanted a very specific movie in a specific genre, in a specific timeframe, in a specific budget, and that outcome gave me a destination, gave me a target to aim for.

From there and looking where I was right now, I could create a map. A path from where I was to where I wanted to be so I could kind of reverse engineer a strategy based on those two points where I was and where I wanted to get to. So my strategy changed. I started building relationships within the industry.

I. I started fundraising in new ways. I honed my pitch and for the first time ever, I was able to raise over $150,000 and we produced a teaser of this movie we [00:04:00] were trying to produce, and we took that to the American film market in Santa Monica. I went to that film market for three or four years in a row to.

Change my strategy. It was a different approach. Instead of waiting for other people to choose us and give us money, I went out there and I met other producers and distributors and directors and financiers. Now, unfortunately, that project fell through, but the results from that different approach have carried me through the last eight years of my.

Most of us fail to clearly define the outcome, and so we end up wandering around or treading water is a word or phrase that I like to use a lot. I also say I like to have, I have many irons in the freezer, , because it feels like I'm doing a lot, but nothing's getting anywhere. It felt like and feels like maybe for you that we're doing everything right.

We're hustling, we're working as hard as we can, but still the truth are in the results. And the [00:05:00] results aren't there yet. That's what I was feeling like, okay, I'm doing everything I can. I'm doing everything right, yet I haven't produced a movie. So what the reality was, I needed a different approach, and this outcome focused approach was the shift.

So how do you make the shift? Well, you start with a big outcome. I love this prompt from Dan Sullivan. He says, looking back three years from now, What has to happen for you to be happy with your progress? Now, if you're listening to this, which I guess that's the only way you could consume a podcast is listen to it, but I would highly recommend that you pause or add a bookmark or a a marker or something so that you can come back to this and actually go through this experiment.

Go through this version of asking yourself questions and putting down answers. Okay, so hit pause or add a bookmark. , let me ref, let me, um, re repose that to you. Looking back three years [00:06:00] from now, what has to happen for you to be happy with your progress? Now I want you to list out everything that comes to mind in every area of your life.

So don't just focus on business, but maybe you'd like to lose some weight. Maybe you want to improve your spirituality, you want to have more money in your savings account, you want to hit certain revenue or growth milestones with your business. Maybe you wanna start a family or buy a house, et cetera. So think about everything and take five to 10 minutes and really just write it all.

It doesn't have to be reasonable. It doesn't have to be within any, within any certain timeframe. Just think about, well, I guess three years, right? So anything that you would like to have that would make you feel happy about your progress in the next three years, write it down. That's what we're doing right now, and if you need to take a second and pause again, go ahead and do that.

Okay. Now the next step is to go through those and highlight two to three that you can realistically achieve in the next 12 [00:07:00] months. Well, how do you do that? First of all, look at anything in that list that could be accomplished in the next year. . Okay, so if it's, you want to go, you want a 100 x your revenue, it's probably not gonna happen in one year.

Sure it's happened to other people, but it's not likely to happen to everybody. But you could certainly 10 x your revenue in a year. That's just 20% growth month over month. You could 10 x your email list, you could 10 x your audience, you could 10 x your revenue. So go through the list of everything you've written down.

circle or underline or highlight anything that could be accomplished in 12 months with some concerted effort. And then I really want you to highlight or surface the two to three that really excite you, that make you feel like, gosh, that would just be the best. And I would love to focus on those big goals for the next 12 months.

So find two to three that you can realistically achieve in the next 12 months that really excite you. Jump off the page and they make you feel like, yes, that's the one, or that's the two, or that's the three [00:08:00] things I wanna do. So take a minute if you need to pause again. Pause now. , okay, now that you're back, make a plan.

That's the next step. The outcome informs the plan, the strategy, and the work it will take to get there. What in big chunks has to happen? Take one goal at a time, one of these big 12 month outcomes, and do one at a time. Don't try to do 'em all three at the same time. Just do one at a time and think in terms of big chunks, what has to happen.

Let's use an example of writing a book. You need to solidify the idea. You need to write the table of contents. You need to write each chapter, and then you're probably gonna work with an editor. Write the second or even third draft. You can get line edited and ready for print with the layout designer.

You need a cover, you need a website, you need a storefront, you need a marketing plan, you need all these things. These are kind of the big chunks, right? We listed out maybe 10 or. . So that nicely lines up to, you know, a month here and a [00:09:00] month there, but maybe some things take a week or it's gonna be handled by someone else, so it doesn't take any of your time and you can start working on the next thing while your editor is working on their notes, right, and their pass on the book.

So yes, it's doable in 12 months, but not if you just wing it. If you just sit down and start writing and hope that you end up with a book that's published and distributed in 12 months, that's very unlikely to. . So what you need to do with your goal is first list out all the chunks that you can think of and then put 'em into order.

What has to happen first. Or you could reverse engineer like I've done in the past and go, okay, well in order to have a book that's selling, I need to have a website. I need to be, have a way to sell it. Well, I can't sell something that doesn't exist, so I need to have imagery and I need to have the book written.

Okay, well, what does it take to write a book? I need 30 chapters and I need to, oh, before I do that, I need to figure out what the chapters are, and I probably should get it edited somewhere in there. So you're kind of just listing out everything that needs to happen, and then you're putting it in order.

Okay, [00:10:00] so once you've done that, put the different steps in order, and then you're just gonna attack them one at a time. Maybe you can kind of chunk them into this quarter, the next three months or 90 days, and then you'll put everything else into the next three quarters. You don't even have to get clarity or very specific on it.

You just know that for the next three months, you're gonna focus on. The, you know, the topic or the idea, the general hook of the book, the table of contents in writing the first five chapters. Maybe that's all you're gonna do in the next 90 days. Or maybe you wanna write the first draft of the book. It totally is up to you and how much time you have.

So, Start putting the steps in order, and then you're just gonna attack them one at a time. You're not gonna try to do marketing plan and website and table of contents and writing all at once, or even in the same week or month. You're going to focus just on the table of contents until it's done. Then you move to the next step, and then you're gonna start writing chapters until they're done.

Maybe you could start sending chapters off to your audience to get feedback or to an editor [00:11:00] to have them being, being edited in tandem. That's totally fine. That's up to you. That's part of your strategy. Depends on what your goal is. Remember the outcome informs the strategy, so put your big goals into these kind of quarterly project.

Every quarter, you're gonna have a set of, I'm gonna accomplish these 2, 3, 4 things and that's what I'm gonna get done this quarter. I'm not even gonna think about anything else until it's time and you decide that it's time to focus on the next part. So your big goals inform your quarterly projects.

Which inform your monthly milestones, and that informs your weekly and daily progress. Okay. The whole goal here is to make progress every day. And it's so much easier when you know exactly what you're gonna sit down and do every day. And it is extremely helpful that those items on your calendar are informed by.

Again, your monthly milestones, your quarterly projects, and your annual big goals. So this [00:12:00] outcome focused approach is the best way that I've found to get things done as a creative entrepreneur. Take last year, for example, and I don't say this to brag, I genuinely share all of this to help you see what's possible because.

You go back 10 years and I was not getting many things done. Sure, we were doing client projects and we were getting work done, but we weren't progressing. We weren't making movies, we weren't making any progress towards getting movies made or scripts written, and we were stuck. But look at last year, I had three businesses cross six figures in revenue.

I have a film producing business, and then Craftsman Creative has a course business. And then there's Craftsman Creative itself. I produced two movies last year, one of them internationally. I created two international courses. The year before that I did about 10. I just had different focus this year and every year your goals and your focus might change, but I created two different podcasts, my own, and then I co-created a the 10 K Creator Show with Joe Pulitz, which has done [00:13:00] 25,000 downloads in the first six months, and I published a book,

Okay, again. Three businesses crossing six figures in revenue, two movies, two courses, two different podcasts, and published the book. I grew my social and e email audiences to over 2000 people, and now my email list is almost to 4,000 as I'm recording this. You can do a lot with this approach now. That's a lot.

That that is a lot. So three to four projects a year is a good place to start. That's why we decided, okay, we want to have two or three big goals for the year, and maybe each one of those is gonna have a project or two that you're gonna accomplish. But while you are, while most people are just doing one project a year or maybe zero, you'll be accomplishing 3, 4, 5, maybe even 10 x as much as everyone around you.

So sound good, ? It feels good, let me tell you. [00:14:00] That's why I'm sharing it with you. So let's tackle a few of the things that show up when I talk to people about this is what you should do. The hardest part about this is that it takes a mindset shift, okay? Again, that's why we talked about mindset first. You kind of understand what it is and how to overcome.

these limiting mindsets and how to shift your mindset. You have to take different actions in order to get different results. And in order to do that, you have to have different beliefs, bigger reasons. You have to shift your mindset in order to get different actions and different results, you're gonna have to plan, schedule, and focus.

It's hard for a lot of creatives to do this cuz they're not used to. calendars and schedules and spreadsheets and plans and goals and outcomes. It's hard to start, but I guarantee it gets easier with time just as anything does. If you're a musician, at some point it was hard to learn how to play your instrument, but now you're mastered it, right?

You can play any song. You can write songs, you can perform in front of an audience. [00:15:00] That was hard at the beginning. It's not hard. So you've done it before. You can do it with this as well. The other thing is you have to be consistent. Projects do not just happen overnight, and they don't just happen on their own.

They're not an event, they're a process. Okay? You have to make consistent daily effort towards your goals, or you're gonna lose momentum and your progress will stall and you'll get frustrated, and then you'll go back to that limiting mindset. So sh make a plan where you're gonna show up every day and.

Progress every day. That's the goal. Make progress every day. Okay, so this outcome focused craftsman mindset approach to creative work is why I called my business craftsman Creative. To help creative entrepreneurs like you have a clear path to the goals and outcomes that you have for your life and your business.

I have not found a better way to create the results that you. I haven't. So that's why I'm sharing it with you [00:16:00] because the best way that I know to help you get the goals and outcomes that you want in your life. So that's it for outcomes. That's the overview of the outcome step of the movie framework.

Next episode, we'll dive into the next part, which is, V, right? V stands for visibility. This incorporates how you pitch your business, how you attract your ideal customers, and how important leads are for your business to thrive. So thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.